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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty good Cold War spy novel,
By
This review is from: The Secret Lovers (Hardcover)
A spy novel written in the 1970s. A CIA officer investigates a murder which reaches back to the Spanish Civil War. Turns out some of his contemporaries were Communist sympathizers (similiar to Kim Philby) who became Soviet spies. Another was a devout Catholic who sided with Franco to oppose the Reds. Meanwhile, this CIA officer hero must also struggle with the challenge of maintaining a happy marriage. His rich young wife is bored and dissatisfied by his constant foreign travel & intrigue.This is a fairly entertaining and well-researched Cold War spy novel, and the domestic side story is engaging without overwhelming the main spy story.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
None Better - but read before listening to it!,
By
This review is from: The Secret Lovers (Paul Christopher Novels) (Audio CD)
The Secret Lovers by McCarry is a cold-eyed but fully engaged odessey of love, the emotional and analytical paths of betrayal and its unraveling, and the imitation of life that is tradecraft.If you found a lifetime of enjoyment in LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (i.e., if you re-read it every few years just to spend a day with an old friend) you will find the same kind of unforgetable stories and characters in this novel, only a few more of them, and most of them a little more developed. McCarry's literary voice (think Scott Fitzgerald to LeCarre's Dickens), his empathic but not the least bit co-dependent connection to his characters, and his ability to remind us that his complete novel is just a few weeks in their busy lives, reminds us that greatness is a quantum leap from the ordinary. The Secret Lovers will stand with Tinker Tailor, and with Erje Ayden's almost unknown Sadness at Leaving, as a masterpiece of a time that is both past and, like the human needs for conflict and resoltion, timeless. This is a book for those for whom printed words on a page have far more power than images on a screen, or probably, for the recorded voice reading them aloud.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful but flawed,
By Dan The Man (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Secret Lovers: A Paul Christopher Novel (Paul Christopher Novels) (Hardcover)
As always, McCarry nails the setting, the atmosphere, the tradecraft, and the characterizations of the personalities of betrayal. What others readers seem to see as tedium, I kind of enjoyed for its realism and graceful prose. Unfortunately, the most flawed aspect of this book was the relationship between the main character, Paul Christopher, and his wife, Cathy. She is literally unbelievable, and if not for her beauty than I can't imagine someone as savvy and smart as Christopher being at all attracted to someone so hopelessly (and idiotically, at times) neurotic. Also, the long back story of Carlos, while an effective passage on its own, was too much of a digression from the main flow of the story. It deflated the tension and deep-sixed the pacing. With the way McCarry writes, you can forgive those sins. But it's not his best.
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